Next of Kin
by Ithilwen K-Bane
Summary: Someone has to inform Poseidon of an unfortunate event. Unfortunately for Nico, it looks like he already knows. Spoilers for MoA. Complete with sequel in progress.


So some guys were making fun of Aquaman, saying no one with fish powers could save the world. Then this guy Ricky stood up, yelled, "Challenge accepted!" and stormed out. Or whatever really happened. Percy, Nico and this interpretation of Poseidon were invented by Rick Riordan. I'm just filling in the blanks.

It's been a long time since I wrote a 'fic as a reaction to something. When I saw that Nathan Fillon would be in _Sea of Monsters_, I caved and read all eight of those books that certain friends of mine had been talking about. They're not perfect but they're still darn good. Thing is, I knew how Mark of Athena was going to end when I started. I just didn't know exactly what that would mean.

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"What is this that you are saying? Would you snatch a mortal man, whose doom has long been fated, out of the jaws of death?" —Juno to Jove, _The Iliad_

"You're still in the cage. With me." —Lucifer to Sam, _Supernatural_

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His steps echoed against the blue-green floor. Nico always felt like an intruder on Olympus. Even now that the House of Hades was at least nominally back in accord with the rest of the gods, without other heroes around him, Nico was an outsider here.

This shrine blended modern and Greek styles with almost no Roman influences. Nico had guessed that he would be here. This place would have helped him remain in one aspect. But then, today, he might prefer to be Roman.

Nico waited in silence for several minutes. Olympus had ruled over many times and places. In Versailles, it was a higher-ranking individual's right to have the first word. On Wall Street, speaking first was a sign of weakness.

Eventually, he decided there was no sense hiding the obvious.

"My lord and uncle," said Nico, finally breaking the silence.

Poseidon raised his head but did not turn, one hand hovering over a column. Instead of the customary vertical fluting, these had a rippling pattern. Nico didn't know much about architecture, but the effect was uncanny, suggesting both seaweed and water currents, drawing the eye upward toward the light over the altar. It made him feel as if he were drowning without pain, like a man for whom death at sea was only the final flourish to a life at sea, like the capital on the top of a column.

Annabeth was in every detail. It was like hearing her voice.

Nico took a few careful steps closer and wished he hadn't. Poseidon wasn't handling the disturbances as well as Aphrodite and Ares were. The buttons on his fisherman's shirt were matched up with the wrong holes, and there were new scratches on his hands and neck that looked like they might have come from a mishandled fishhook. Worse, when Nico looked at him out of the corner of his eye, he seemed to be wearing robes made out of the darkness below the waves, his skin pale instead of tanned.

Other than that, he seemed calm, at least from the back, calm as the doldrums that stretched across shipping lanes from the Sea of Japan to Panama. Huge cargo freighters had been toppled to the depths of the Atlantic and Pacific. The Mare Nostrum was alive with waves tall enough to snatch a flying ship from the air. At first they'd thought it was some ally of Gaea's, but when the water had started to _speak_...

"My palace had a room like this," he said, staring at a mosaic showing Cyclopes at an undersea forge. "That was before the battle with Oceanus."

"Perhaps he told her about it."

"He never saw it."

Percy had described his brief visit to his father's kingdom. Nico hadn't said anything. Father had once told him that Poseidon was careful not to flaunt his bastards in front of Amphitrite, that that was why she tolerated his indiscretions better than Hera tolerated Zeus's. (In Zeus's defense, the fact that Amphitrite lived at the bottom of the ocean made that a bit easier.) An aberration like Tyson was no threat to her pride, not next to Amphitrite's own splendid son. But Percy was hard to ignore even when he was a thousand miles inland. She wouldn't have been happy that he'd drawn even one watery breath in her house. Even if they hadn't been under attack, staying to admire the decor would have been out of the question.

And then there was the part where Percy had been the one to convince Poseidon to abandon his own realm to defend Olympus instead. Countless undersea beings had died because of that decision, others captured or worse. Many more would have died if the war had been lost, but the merfolk were not a forgiving people. Percy was no hero to them.

Watching their king shake the ocean with more grief for his freakish land-walking half-son than for the thousands of soldiers who had died in his service? Saying that they weren't taking it well didn't cover it. The last thing Olympus needed was an insurrection among pelagic mortals. It didn't look as though the sea god would be in any condition to deal with one. He could barely deal with this conversation.

"We accept that their lives are short." The words rushed back like gray waves into the sea. "We try to help them leave a mark on the world before the end comes." Poseidon moved one hand as if to cover his face, "But that place..." Nico felt a tremor as the earth beneath Manhattan shook. He fought the urge to step back. For a second, the sea god's green eyes had gone as dark as stormclouds.

"Percy is a hero," said Nico. "It should have been Elysium."

"It should have been Olympus," Poseidon said coldly. "If he had accepted Zeus's offer, he would be—" Poseidon closed his eyes, seeming to shake something off.

They'd told Percy he could be his father's lieutenant. Did that mean repairing the ocean world by Poseidon's side or getting stuck as the god of Long Island Sound? Nico imagined Percy dealing with polluted dredge-silt and unable to travel past Montauk without a signed permission slip from Zeus. From what he'd seen, turning immortal could go either way, especially considering how much Zeus liked to put other gods' loose cannons on short leashes. Eurytion had gotten off easy.

Nico stepped forward. "He hasn't died, sir. I would know if he had."

Nico hadn't expected that to be what set him off, but there was no telling these days. Poseidon's form seemed to shift as one thick hand closed around Nico's throat. His eyes had gone dark and his skin as white as a drowned man's. Nico had to fight not to flinch at the resemblance to Father. This was a god of an ocean that might as well be the Underworld.

Neptune glared at him, lip curling in contempt as his grip tightened and Nico felt his feet leave the floor. "Son of Hades," he said as Nico's lungs started to bubble with salt. "You flicker past Cerberus and you think you know the foundations of the world. Not even you know what happens in Tartarus," he bit out the last word, voice breaking into a snarl. "It's home to powers too old to name. I cast half of them down myself. They've craved revenge since before humans had fire, and _now they have my son_."

Nico focused as hard as he could on the walls around him, the seastone altar, the pictures he'd seen of temples in Greece, and the name _Poseidon_,_ Poseidon_,_ Poseidon_, all offered up like blood into a brazier.

He hit the blue-green floor, gasping and choking out seawater. When he opened his eyes, his uncle was pressing a sun-calloused hand to his forehead. "Do not overstep yourself, Nico di Angelo. Hero of Olympus or not, you presume too much if you think I require your help." Except he did. That was the point of all this.

"It's easier when you're ...the other guy, isn't it?" Nico asked. "Because you aren't as close to this?" But he was here, surrounded by Greek images, holding his head under the surface of what had happened.

"Ares gave me his condolences," Poseidon said pointedly. "He said he knew how much I'd loved it when the most powerful half-human was _one of my get_. As if for a _second_ that—" Poseidon cut off as his voice began to rumble, pressing his hand over his forehead as if in pain as the foundations of the temple shook.

"It was not the _power_," Poseidon said, pronouncing each word carefully, as if he'd had to tie each one down with fishing line.

"I know, my lord," said Nico. It was no mystery what made Percy rare and Ares jealous.

Having a powerful hero at your command was one thing, but Percy took it a step further. He was loyal to Olympus—more loyal than made any sense. By human standards, Poseidon was a deadbeat dad. For some reason, Percy managed not to see it that way. He'd always seemed to accept that his father lived by different rules in a way that most demigods didn't. Nico had spent more time with Hades than Percy had with Poseidon; he'd even lived under his father's roof with his father's queen under orders to tolerate him, but he still didn't _get_ Hades the way Percy got Poseidon. That boy had been fed the leftover scraps of his father's attention and still literally and figuratively worshiped the man.

"It wasn't the bragging rights," Nico said carefully, halfway to a question. "It was the connection."

"Why are you here? You did not come to tell me that my son is at the mercy of his enemies. If you have no business with me, then leave me to mourn him in peace."

_If you were mourning in peace I would be on my way to the Doors of Death by now._ But Nico knew better than to say it.

There was a bitterness in Poseidon's voice that Nico had not expected, even when he wasn't morphing in and out of Neptune rage mode. Nico did not know the foundations of the world, but he knew death, and he knew grief, and something was off about all this. The gods were capable of love and loss but did not experience either the way mortals did. That usually made their emotions seem shallow. Something had made Poseidon deep.

Almost as if...

It was as if the water had finally leaped high enough to leave the sea floor bare, with every hidden, scuttling thing exposed and forced to face its own shadow. Suddenly Nico could see to the bottom of what had made Poseidon lash the waves.

"Has this happened before?" Nico said in a soft voice.

"I have had many mortal sons and daughters," Poseidon answered, too quickly.

Nico had seen enough of the judgment to know that Percy was headed for Elysium, or he had been before Arachne had given him the fast track past the bureaucracy. Many heroic souls were judged worthy once and called it an afterlife. Asking to be reborn came with a risk. One little mistake and it was all the asphodel you could squash underfoot for all eternity, no matter what world you saved the last time around. But not Percy. He would aim for the Isles of the Blessed. He would go for three. He couldn't be _Percy_ and make any other decision.

So he might have made it before.

"This isn't his first life," Nico realized out loud. Poseidon glared back. "You knew Percy before, maybe not as a son, but you _knew_ him, and you—"

Nico jumped back on reflex, using the shadows to boost his speed as Neptune's fingers closed just short of his eye. The skin he'd brushed flamed as if it had been whipped by a Man-of-War.

_And you lost him then, too_, Nico had managed not to say.

"The Fates do not tell the gods when a hero is reborn," he replied.

"But you know anyway," Nico said, carefully making sure there was a shadow between his uncle and himself as he stepped sideways across a mosaic of Typhon with a trident through his neck. "That's why you've risked so much for him over the years. That's why you threw Percy into the Underworld on his first quest. You knew he could do it."

"That's not true. I didn't recognize him until—" Neptune brought himself up short. He shot Nico a cold look. Then he breathed inward and Nico felt his ears pop as Poseidon reasserted himself.

"I'm right, aren't I?" he asked.

His gaze traced across a tapestry of mermen defeating a giant squid. "You wouldn't know the name," he said before Nico could ask. "The stories of undersea heroes are not told in the upper air. But yes, I ...knew him."  
"He was a hero of the ocean world?" Nico asked. He could usually manage to stay focused, especially with a highly time-sensitive quest on the line, but his mind was racing. It was true that the stories weren't told in the upper air, but the dead loved to talk, and they came from all over. He'd heard about a younger son of Poseidon and Amphitrite, killed by the titans. Or maybe a human naval captain like Themistocles or a demigod like Periclymenus of Pylos. That could be why Percy had taken to Frank so quickly. And there had been that ...guy. Nico couldn't pronounce his name above the water, but he'd been an undersea hero with no godly blood, a mer-version of the original Jason.

"What was he?"

"_Mine_," Poseidon said pointedly. "Percy was mine. That was all he needed to know. That is more than you need to know." The words came like the whisper of waves lapping the shore. "Sally Jackson gave him back to me," he said. "But only to _me_. No one else knows. No one else would care if they did."

Nico wondered who he meant by no one.

"Why didn't you tell him?" Anything else, _anything_ else that connected Percy to his father's world would have meant the world to him. It was one of those things that he and Nico had actually had in common. Two sons who got so much more from their parents than most of the kids they knew didn't get to say how it was still so much less than they wanted.

"Because it could do no good," Poseidon answered. "At best, he'd have become discontented with his lot. He's my mortal son who walks the land; that's where he belongs. At worst..." Nico knew the worst. There were too many kinds of it.

"You will not tell him, Nico di Angelo," Poseidon fixed him with an intense but blessedly lucid glare. He smiled, again, bitter but steady. "It seems that's a pattern with you, keeping important secrets from your friends."

"Percy's pattern is overcoming the odds, sir," Nico answered. "If I can make it to the Doors, he'll have a fighting chance. This thing you're doing in the Mare Nos—in the Mediterranean. It's forced us to stop."

"You'll only be pulled in with him, Nico. You understand what that means."

"Yes, Uncle, I do," Nico answered. Obliteration. Oblivion. His essence and his power consumed and used against Olympus. "He's had faith in you his whole life. Maybe you should have some faith in him. And he has Annabeth with him. That always helps."

"That girl," Poseidon said pointedly. He looked away, and Nico realized he was studying the cornicing over the lintel. "If not for her..."

If not for her, this building wouldn't be standing, and Poseidon would be having a much harder time remaining lucid.

If not for her, Percy wouldn't have been pulled into the pit. Or they wouldn't have found the Parthenos at all.

If not for her, Percy would have said yes to godhood, and Poseidon would have had him back forever, but Nico wasn't sure he knew that. To everyone in camp, it was obvious to the point of "Well _duh_," but the Olympians seemed to have taken Percy's explanation at face value.

"I will still the waves," Poseidon said. He opened his mouth but then closed it again, and Nico could guess what would have come next. _As much as I can_ or _unless I become so trapped in my other selves that I can't remember you_.

"Thank you, lord."

"You can go now, Nico. Don't scuff the doorpost on your way out."

He didn't wait to be dismissed twice, diving for the nearest shadow and riding his own element back to the ship. He stumbled out of the dark, swaying on suddenly weak legs as Hazel pushed herself away from the mast and hurried toward him.

"Did you see him?" she asked as Jason watched from the wheel. Wincing, Hazel touched the skin of Nico's face.

"Yeah. Did it work?" asked as Frank as he guided Nico toward a bench built into the deck. "The water stopped doing ...it about ten minutes back," Frank supplied. "Did you really go to Olympus? What did you say to him?"

It had been less about what Nico had said, he knew. It had been about listening, giving the sea god a place to put his fury other than the waters that they had to cross. Nico lurched toward the rail, holding on carefully as he looked down at the waves below. When he'd left, they'd been leaping up like grasping hands. They'd been snarling in a voice like a hundred serpents:

"_Where is my son? Where is my son?_"

"Better save your strength," said Jason. "Getting to the doors is going to be hard enough. If we don't meet Percy there, we're screwed."

"Yeah," murmured Nico, touching the stinging flesh around his eye. His fingers came away bloody. "One way or another."

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drf24 at columbia dot edu


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